'But, mum, no one else at school wears a coat'

11 March 2005

Keeping warm is no longer a stylish option for teenagers, says Mary Killen. After all, that would ruin 'the look'

Once more to the GP with my teenage daughter and her wheezy chest. Once more, the doctor diagnoses a chest infection and prescribes antibiotics - her second course of the winter. Now is the chance for me to get a qualified medical practitioner to support my theory that the problem is caused by her refusal to wear a coat during the piercingly cold weather.

But no, he says, "it's a common misapprehension that you catch a cold through being cold. The reason that children and young people catch so many of these rhinovirus infections is because their immune systems aren't fully developed."

He leaves me thwarted and without a leg to stand on in my continuing battle with my daughter.

"You have got to be joking if you think I'm going to wear a coat," she says. "No one else at school wears one."

Her friend corrects her. "No, that's not quite true. The foreign pupils wear them - the Chinese and the Japanese, the ones who don't understand English fashion."

But why should "English fashion" have suddenly eschewed the coat - as any parent who does the school run will testify? Daily, we witness the spectacle of armies of teenagers clad only in a few ounces of nylon and cotton and, occasionally, a thin wool blazer to protect their torsos.

"But don't you prefer to be warm and cosy in bad weather?" I ask the teenagers.

"We don't want to look 'chubbed'," they say. "Coats bulk up your shoulders so you can't move them. We don't want to cover up our stylish tops. And fur gilets are almost over, they have become too high-streety."

Jenny Dyson, editor of Teen Vogue, understands the problem. "I don't think there are any coats that are acceptable to teenagers, unless it is Mum's Chanel or Dad's retro Belstaff jacket," she says. "Topshop offers some great, cheap high-street options, but the trouble is that coats cover up 'the look'. They are very concealing and girls like to be revealing."

In my teenage day, the winter coat was the key to the season's wardrobe. Now, one goes between centrally over-heated classrooms into oven-like trains or buses, passing only briefly through the Arctic outdoors. So who can blame the teens if they don't want to have to keep dressing and undressing?

When clubbing, clad in little more than thongs, they don't want the impediment of a coat, because they don't want to waste precious time in the cloakroom queue. Nor do they want to stand around with a glass in one hand and several kilos of winter coat in the other.

As a parent, one would hope that schools would have a policy on coat-wearing, but they don't. "There's no point. They would take them off as soon as they got out of sight," one school secretary told me.

"If you do get a child to wear a coat," said another, "they will wear it off the shoulder or drag it along by the sleeves."

Only at Eton, where they have had hundreds of years to get things right, is the coat problem sorted. The Eton tailcoat - which is cut in such a way that the boys do not look "chubbed" - must be worn at all times. And it is comfortable, warm and affords a certain amount of protection from the rain.

For non-Etonians, Dyson suggests a solution. "Invest in a second-hand cashmere - a lovely, long-sleeved thin cashmere sweater. Perhaps a pale pink one that they can wear as a T-shirt underneath their uniform. It's all to do with layering."

But just when I think I have finally got to grips with teenage fashion, my daughter pulls the rug from under me. Between bouts of bronchial coughing, she informs me that umbrellas - for decades, the hallmark of a nerd - are now cool. "Big spotty ones," she says, "the more ridiculous-looking the better."